Is it marketing? Absolutely. Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so.

I showed this in my class today and the kids were pretty interested. Funny; they knew who Mark Zuckerberg was as soon as he came up on the video. Bill Gates on screen elicited a “who’s that?” Changing times.

Most interesting comments in the video:

“You don’t have to be a genius to code. Do you have to be a genius to read?” (1:55 in)

and

“The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You know, you are going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.” (4:54 in)

That got the attention of a whole room full of teenagers.

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My ideas about teaching teaching and learning are changing. They are becoming broader and including more room for coding and creating in all sorts of ways.

That doesn’t mean I’m throwing away everything I’ve learned over the past years. But it does mean that I want to look a little more broadly about what education can become with the tools that we have access to.

I gave the keynote session at the BYTE conference last week and I heard myself say something that I’ve said many times at conferences before:

“Computers in classroom are not meant to be just fancy typewriters. Computers need to allow us to do completely new things. Completely different things.”

I’ve said this before. Other people have said this before. But this time it really got me thinking about what “different” means. I’ve been thinking about transforming classrooms. About rereading curriculum documents through a twenty first century lens. I’ve been thinking about science and math, but also about reading and writing and art. How do these things look? How should they look?

For the past few years my classroom has been based around the Idea Hive, a collaborative hybrid online space. That isn’t going away. But I’m thinking about “new” and “different.” I’m thinking about a new focus on innovation, on creativity, on communication.  I’m wondering what a classroom might look like that has a real focus on doing things that we couldn’t do without the technology.

That’s led me to design this new logo tonight that will be going up in my classroom as soon as I can get a full size version made:

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I decided to give twitter a try. In about 20 minutes, this is the conversation that followed:

That simple.

Now I’ve used twitter for a lot of things, but not usually for actual, physical stuff. People have been generous with their time, their files and other resources, but real physical stuff is different. But yet, the problem I had was easily and simply solved. And an even more interesting part of this is that this is quite possibly the first interaction that Mavis and I have had on twitter.

People are good and generous.

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Short, fast paced and a challenging thing to do, I thought it was worth sharing. (scroll up to the 6:00 mark for the sound and the keynote to actually begin)

As well that morning the folks from BYTE asked @Tyler_JL, a pre-service teacher who doodles a la Gulia Forsythe to capture a representation of my short talk. This is what he came up with:

My first time at BYTE. A great gathering of people and a group of interested educators trying to push the edges of possibility.

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When it came out a few years ago it caused quite a stir because it laid bare the dramatic changes to reality that the advertising industry was causing. It brought to light how “Photoshopped” images were. I remember showing this in my classroom and watching the shocked and amazed faces of my students.

More interesting, I used this in my classroom as the basis of a number of projects. We made our own images and photoshopped the heck out of them, producing pictures that in many ways had no connection to reality.

But I had a larger purpose behind this. I wanted to dispel the magic behind these types of ads which can do so much damage to kids. I thought that if I could teach kids to make pictures like these of their own, it would allow them to see behind these ads and be more critical of what they were viewing.

By and large, I am glad to say that this worked. It led to conversations between students where they questioned and wondered about the reality behind the images they were consuming.

This same argument applies to teaching kids how to code.

I used to argue against teaching coding. I used to argue that I wasn’t interested in teaching kids how to make lights blink.

My mind is changing on this issue. But it’s not changing because I want to turn every kid into a computer programmer. It’s changing because I want to dispel the magic that happens every time a student clicks a button or uses a new website or web service. Right now, for most of them, when they click their mouse to open a new web service, magic happens. They have no idea how the service works or why it happens. They simply know it works.

I no longer believe this is enough.

I don’t know how to make or design a car. I don’t know how to completely rebuild the engine in my truck. But I do know how to change my oil, change a tire or a belt. While I don’t know the entire process or designing and building a vehicle, I do know many of the basics. This is the same argument that I am applying to coding. I don’t believe that every student needs to be a full blown hardcore coder, I do think that they should have some information about how all of this works. We don’t just teach kids to read books, but we give them the skills to write their own.

We are intense users of technology and our students are often even more so. Yet most of them (and us for that matter) have little idea how all of this stuff works. As I heard a comedian say one time. “If I dropped you off in the bush with just an axe, how long would it be until you could send me an email?”

This is why initiatives like Raspberry Pi and Scratch are important. This is why Estonia is teaching first graders to code.

It’s technology …. not magic. We need to break through these barriers. And I’m not sure in North America if this is even on our radar.

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Real world problems are multi disciplinary, crossing the boundaries of many people, their expertise, places and time. We need a variety of people, with different skill sets to pull together as collaborative teams in order to deeply understand and think about real world issues.

Knowing that I wonder what’s up with the popularity of Ipads and apps in classrooms?

Most apps, generally speaking, are focussed on a single task. Multiplication tables. Continents and countries. A single game. Most of these apps allow the user to focus on a single task or skill. They don’t generally reach for higher order thinking such as synthesis and evaluation. Of course there are exceptions. Calendar apps that allow people to work together. Evernote allowing us to collect information about topics and share that with other people. But overall, I don’t think it would take an indepth evaluation to see how most apps are structured.

This has left me wondering lately if the Ipad the “ultimate” NCLB machine? Is it proving to be so popular in classrooms and districts not because it is the best device for learning, but because it is the best device for focussing on small, discrete skills that are  in turn the focus of standardized tests?

Are these locked down, easy to manage devices the best, easy to use computing device, or are they simply the best device for promoting a certain kind of learning at the expense of a much more open possibility?

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They looked like this:

When I opened them up, this is what I found:

A Raspberry Pi. Two of them actually. At $35 each I ordered two of them. That’s a teaspoon above the board to give you some sense of scale. I knew they were small, but I didn’t know they were as small as they are.

These little machines have a lot of potential. Google is giving out 15000 of them to kids in the UK.

I’ve told the kids in my class about them. I’ve told them that they are coming. I honestly think they are more excited about them then they were about the new imacs that we started the year with.

Coding, computer programming and global connections in classrooms aren’t new. But at $35 each, these little machines just might open up this world to a few more people.

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“I’ve been thinking about the effects of the internet for a couple of decades now. I’ve watched industry after industry forced to renegotiate their methods and models, in the face of a medium that allows for perfect copying, global distribution, zero incremental cost, ridiculously easy group-forming: The music business. Newspapers. Travel agents. Publishers. Hotel owners. And while watching, I’ve always wondered what I’d do when my turn came.

And now here it is. And it turns out my job is to tell you not to trust us when we claim that there’s something sacred and irreplaceable about what we academics do. What we do is run institutions whose only rationale—whose only excuse for existing—is to make people smarter.

Sometimes we try to make ourselves smarter. We call that research. Sometimes we try to make our peers smarter. We call that publishing. Sometimes we try to make our students smarter. We call that teaching. And that’s it. That’s all there is. These are important jobs for sure, and they are hard jobs at times, but they’re not magic. And neither are we.”

If that wasn’t enough, the article finishes with this:

“Instead, like every threatened profession, I see my peers arguing that we, uniquely, deserve a permanent bulwark against insurgents, that we must be left in charge of our destiny, or society will suffer the consequences. Even the record store clerks tried that argument, back in the day. In the academy, we have a lot of good ideas and a lot of practice at making people smarter, but it’s not obvious that we have the best ideas, and it is obvious that we don’t have all the ideas. For us to behave as if we have—or should have—a monopoly on educating adults is just ridiculous.”

I can hear the sacred cows beginning to stampede from here.

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Locking down your facebook page and your twitter account and being careful about what kinds of photos you post online is an important set of skills for students to have.

But this…. I’m not even sure what to say about this.

Raytheon has developed a product called RIOT which culls tremendous amounts of data from social networking sites and collects it into formats that can be used to track your behaviour and even predict the future of your movements.

This is scary stuff.

Watch for yourself.

(UPDATE: This video has been removed by the user from youtube. I’ve searched across the web far and wide but apparently someone (Raytheon’s lawyers…?) keeps getting them taken offline every time a new copy appears. I’ll keep looking and repost the video if one turns up online. If anyone finds a link to a copy of the video, I’d appreciate an email and a link so that I can repost this. I think it’s important.

The Guardian newspaper who originally broke this story still has their copy up. You can find it here. It just cannot be embedded anywhere else.)

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Attached to it was a pdf that they wanted me to sign authorizing a few authors to use the blogging rubric that I had created a few years ago. These authors were writing a college textbook potentially to be priced at $117 and they wanted to include my rubric in it. A few years ago I had signed the same paper allowing this resource of mine to be included in the first version of this book.

But this time I said no. This time I emailed them and simply said that I wasn’t interested in allowing them to use this piece. A few emails ensued where they questioned my decision and asked me to reconsider. In the end, I still said no thanks.

I’ve decided that there was no use allowing this piece of my work to be included in this textbook. This time, it just didn’t seem to make sense. I’ve been fortunate enough to have my classroom practices mentioned and examined in a number of books and articles. But, with my own stuff, everything I make and share online is covered under a Creative Commons license. If you want anything of mine; take it. Modify it. Use it in your classroom. Just don’t pretend its yours and sell it and make a bunch of money.

What effect will this have on Pearson publishing? None at all. I hope it doesn’t interfere with the authors (none of whom I know) or their work. I sincerely hope that their piece goes forward with this only being a small blip in the road for them. But in this day, when even a guy like me, an educator from a small town in the middle of nowhere, can have a global voice and share their work and ideas with anyone who wants it, publishing something in a locked down $117 book seems like an anachronism from another age.

By the way, here’s the link to the blogging rubric. Use it as you will.

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